Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now that we have refuted those who think otherwise about the world and about God its maker than the truth holds, let us return to the divine construction of the world, as it is handed down in the hidden writings of holy religion. God, then, made the heaven before all else, and raised it aloft to serve as the dwelling-place of God its own founder. Next he laid the foundation of the earth and set it beneath the heaven, so that man, together with the other kinds of living creatures, might dwell upon it. This he willed to be encircled and held together by moisture. But his own abode he marked apart and filled with radiant lights: he adorned it with the sun, with the moon's gleaming disk, and with the sparkling signs of the glittering stars. Darkness, on the other hand, which is the opposite of these, he established on the earth; for the earth holds no light of its own, unless it receives it from heaven, in which he placed everlasting light and the gods above and unending life, and, contrariwise, on the earth, darkness and the world below and death. For these are as far removed from those higher things as evils are from goods and vices from virtues. Of the earth itself, too, he established two opposite and differing parts, namely east and west. God claims the east as his own, since from him springs light itself, from him comes the brightness that illumines all things, and through him we are raised up into life without end; the west, on the other hand, is attributed to that troubled and corrupted mind, since it conceals the light, since darkness follows always in its train, and since through it men decline into sin and are lost. Light, then, is the east's own possession, and within light dwells the very principle of life; darkness belongs to the west, harboring within itself both death and ruin. Next, by the same reasoning he measured out the other two regions, south and north, which regions are joined to those first two by a kind of fellowship. For the region that burns with the sun's heat lies nearest to and borders on the east, while the one that is numb with cold and perpetual frost belongs to the same quarter as the farthest setting. For just as darkness is the opposite of light, so is cold the opposite of heat. As heat, then, stands nearest to light, so does the south stand nearest to the east; as cold stands nearest to darkness, so does the northern region stand nearest to the west. To each of these regions he assigned its own season: spring to the east, summer to the southern region; autumn belongs to the west, winter to the north. In these same two regions, the southern and the northern, is also contained a figure of life and of death, since life lies in heat and death in cold. And just as heat comes from fire, so does cold come from water. Following the same division of these regions, he also made day and night, which fill out, in alternating succession, those unbroken and revolving spans and cycles of time that we call years. The day, which the rising east first supplies, must belong to God, as do all things that are better; but the night, which the farthest west brings on, belongs, of course, to him whom we have called the rival of God. And God, foreknowing what was to come, made these two things for this reason also, that in them a kind of image might be shown of both true religion and false superstitions. For just as the sun, which rises to bring the day — though it is but one (whence Cicero would have it that it is called "sol," because, when the stars are hidden, it alone appears) — yet because it is a true light of perfect fullness, illuminates all things with its most potent heat and its most brilliant radiance, so in God, though he is one, his majesty and power and splendor are perfect. But the night, which we say has been allotted to that wicked counter-god, shows forth, by its likeness, his many and various religions. Though the stars appear countless and seem to flicker and gleam, they are, after all, not whole and solid bodies of light, so they give off no warmth, nor can their sheer number overpower the dark. Two primary elements thus emerge, each holding a power set against and opposed to the other — namely heat and moisture — and God devised these in marvelous fashion so that all things might be sustained and brought into being. Since God's own power dwells within fire and heat, had he not moderated that burning force by blending into it the substance of cold and moisture, nothing could ever have come into existence or held together — whatever had begun to be would have been consumed at once in a blaze. This is why certain philosophers and poets claimed the world was composed of a discord that harmonizes; yet the reasoning behind it wholly escaped them. Heraclitus said that all things were born from fire, Thales from water. Each saw something, yet each was mistaken, because if either alone had existed, water could not have been born from fire, nor, in turn, fire from water; rather it is truer that all things are generated from a mixture of both together. Fire indeed cannot be mixed with water, since the two are hostile, and if they come to close quarters, whichever prevails must necessarily destroy the other; but their substances can be mingled — the substance of fire being heat, that of water, moisture. Rightly, then, does Ovid say: when moisture and heat have taken on a due measure together, they conceive, and from these two all things arise. And since fire is at war with water, moist vapor creates all things, a discordant harmony fit for offspring. For the one is, as it were, a masculine element, the other feminine; the one active, the other passive. For this reason it was established by the ancients that the bonds of marriage be sealed by the rite of fire and water, since the offspring of living creatures take bodily form and are given life by heat and moisture. For since every living creature consists of soul and body, moisture supplies the substance of the body, heat that of the soul — as we may learn from the young of birds, which, full of thick moisture, cannot take bodily form nor have their bodies given life unless the craftsman-heat broods over them. It was also customary to forbid exiles the use of fire and water, for it still seemed a wicked thing to put men, however guilty, to death outright. So, once the use of those things on which human life depends was forbidden, it was reckoned just as if the man on whom that sentence had fallen had been punished with death. So much were these two elements held to be primary that men believed neither the origin of man nor his life could hold together without them. Of these two elements, one is held in common with the beasts, while the other is granted to man exclusively. For since we are a heavenly and immortal creature, we make use of fire, which has been given to us as proof of our immortality, since fire comes from heaven; and because its nature is mobile and strains upward, life's own principle resides in it. The remaining creatures, being entirely mortal, rely on water alone, which is a bodily and earthly element; and because its nature is mobile and inclines downward, it displays the shape of death. For this reason cattle neither look up to heaven nor have any sense of religion, since the use of fire is foreign to them. But how or by what means God either kindled or distilled these two primary elements, fire and water, only he who made them can know.
When the world, then, had been thus completed, he commanded that living creatures of various kinds, of unlike forms, both great and small, should come into being. Male and female of each kind were brought forth together, and from their offspring air, earth, and sea grew full; and to every kind God, in its proper measure, gave nourishment drawn from the ground, so man could put them to use — some for food, without doubt, others for clothing, and those of great strength to help in the working of the land, whence they are called "beasts of burden." When all things had thus been arranged in a wonderful order, he determined to build for himself an everlasting kingdom and to call into existence souls beyond counting, on whom he would confer immortality. Next he fashioned for himself a likeness gifted with sense and reason — that is, cast in the shape of his own image, than which none could be more flawless — molding man from the wet clay of the earth, whence man (homo) is so called, because he is fashioned out of soil (humus). Accordingly Plato says that the human form is godlike (theoeides), and the Sibyl says: "man is my image, possessing right reason." Of this fashioning of man the poets, too, have handed down an account which, though corrupted, is not altogether different: for they said that man was made from clay by Prometheus. The fact did not deceive them, but the name of the maker did. For they had not touched at all upon the letters of truth, but gathered from fables and dim opinion, and distorted, those things that had been handed down by the utterance of the prophets and were kept within the sanctuary of God — just as truth, when scattered abroad among the common people in varied reports, tends to be corrupted, with everyone adding something to what he has heard — these things they wove into their songs. And here, in truth, their folly showed itself, for they credited a mortal with a work so marvelous and so godlike. For what need was there for man to be fashioned out of clay, when he could have been begotten by the same process by which Prometheus himself was born of Iapetus? If Prometheus was a man, he could beget a man, but he could not make one; and that he was not of the number of the gods his punishment on Mount Caucasus makes plain. Nor indeed did anyone ever call his father Iapetus, or his uncle Titan, a god, because supremacy in the kingdom belonged to Saturn alone, through whom, together with all his descendants, divine honors were obtained. This fiction of the poets can be refuted by many arguments. It is agreed among all that a flood came to destroy and remove wickedness from the face of the earth; philosophers, poets, and chroniclers of antiquity alike speak of it, and on this point above all they concur with the prophets' own testimony. If, then, the flood came about for this reason, that the wickedness which had grown through excessive multiplication of mankind might be destroyed, how could Prometheus be the one who made man, given that they themselves claim his son Deucalion was the sole survivor, spared for his righteousness? And how could one generation, sprung from a single stock, have repopulated the whole earth so speedily? But evidently they corrupted this story too, as they did the former one, since they did not know either at what time the flood occurred on earth, or who deserved, on account of righteousness, to be preserved while the human race perished, or how, or with whom, he was preserved — all of which the prophetic writings teach. It appears, then, that what they relate about the workmanship of Prometheus is false. But since I have said that poets are not accustomed to lie outright, but rather to wrap and obscure what they say in figures, I do not say that they lied, but rather that Prometheus was the first of all to shape a likeness of man out of soft and rich clay, and that from him first arose the art of fashioning statues and images, since indeed he lived in the time of Jupiter, when temples first began to be established and new forms of worship of the gods began. Truth, in this way, gets dressed up in falsehood, and a deed originally attributed to God came instead to be credited to a man who merely copied the divine work. As for the rest, the shaping of the real and living man out of clay belongs to God. This too Hermes hands down, who said not only that man was made by God in the image of God, but even attempted to explain by what subtle reasoning he formed each single member of the human body, since there is not one of them that does not serve as much for necessary use as for beauty. This, indeed, even the Stoics, when they discourse on providence, attempt to show, and Tully, following them, touches upon this rich and abundant subject briefly in a number of places, though I now pass over it for this reason, that I have recently written a book of my own on this subject to my pupil Demetrianus. I cannot pass over this point here, that certain philosophers, in error, say that men and the other living creatures arose from the earth without any maker, whence comes that line of Virgil: "and the earth-born race of men lifted their heads from the hard fields." And those especially held this view who deny that there is providence, for the Stoics attribute the fashioning of living creatures to divine skill. Aristotle, however, freed himself from the trouble and difficulty by saying that the world has always existed; and so, he says, the human race and the other things that are in it have no beginning, but have always existed and always will. Yet we observe that every individual living creature, once absent, comes into being and later passes away — which shows that its whole kind, too, must at some point have started, and must at some point stop, precisely because it had a start. For all things must be contained within three times — past, present, and future. To the past belongs origin, to the present, substance, to the future, dissolution. Each single man displays all three: birth marks our beginning, living our being, dying our end. This, too, is why men imagined three Fates — one starting the thread of a man's life, a second spinning it onward, a third snapping and closing it off. Yet across mankind as a whole, only the present moment ever shows itself; from it, all the same, we can work out both the past, namely its beginning, and the future, namely its passing away. Since it exists at all, it must have started at some point — nothing, after all, can come to be without a start — and having started, it must likewise come to an end at some point; for that whole cannot be immortal which is made up of mortal parts. For just as we perish one by one, individually, so it could happen that all should perish at once by some single event — whether by barrenness of the lands, which is wont to happen in particular regions, or by a pestilence spread everywhere, which for the most part lays waste single cities or regions, or by a fire loosed upon the world, such as is said once to have happened under Phaethon, or by a flood of waters, such as is handed down to have occurred under Deucalion, when the whole human race was destroyed except for one man. If that flood happened by chance, then surely it could also have happened that even that one man who survived should have perished. But if he was preserved by the will of divine providence, which cannot be denied, in order that mankind might be restored, then it is plain that the life or the destruction of the human race lies in the power of God. And if he is able to destroy it entirely, because he destroys it part by part, it is plain that it had a beginning at some point; and its fragility, just as it points to a beginning, so too it points to an end. If these things are true, Aristotle will not be able to defend the claim that the world itself did not have a beginning. And if Plato and Epicurus wrest this admission from Aristotle, then Epicurus will, however unwillingly, wrest from both Plato and Aristotle — who, eloquent as they are, held that the world will always be — the same admission, since it follows that it must also have an end. But more on this in the last book; now let us return to the origin of man.